The Messengers | Page 7

broken, the signs of spring did not console him. At
each week-end he filled the house with people, but they found him
gloomy and he found them dull. He liked better the solitude of the
midweek days. Then for hours he would tramp through the woods,
pretending she was at his side, pretending he was helping her across the
streams swollen with winter rains and melted snow. On these
excursions he cut down trees that hid a view he thought she would have
liked, he cut paths over which she might have walked. Or he sat idly in
a flat- bottomed scow in the lake and made a pretence of fishing. The
loneliness of the lake and the isolation of the boat suited his humor. He
did not find it true that misery loves company. At least to human beings
he preferred his companions of Lone Lake--the beaver building his
home among the reeds, the kingfisher, the blue heron, the wild fowl
that in their flight north rested for an hour or a day upon the peaceful
waters. He looked upon them as his guests, and when they spread their

wings and left him again alone he felt he had been hardly used.
It was while he was sunk in this state of melancholy, and some months
after Miss Kirkland had sailed to Egypt, that hope returned.
For a week-end he had invited Holden and Lowell, two former
classmates, and Nelson Mortimer and his bride. They were all old
friends of their host and well acquainted with the cause of his
discouragement. So they did not ask to be entertained, but, disregarding
him, amused themselves after their own fashion. It was late Friday
afternoon. The members of the house-party had just returned from a
tramp through the woods and had joined Ainsley on the terrace, where
he stood watching the last rays of the sun leave the lake in darkness.
All through the day there had been sharp splashes of rain with the
clouds dull and forbidding, but now the sun was sinking in a sky of
crimson, and for the morrow a faint moon held out a promise of fair
weather.
Elsie Mortimer gave a sudden exclamation, and pointed to the east.
"Look!" she said.
The men turned and followed the direction of her hand. In the fading
light, against a background of sombre clouds that the sun could not
reach, they saw, moving slowly toward them and descending as they
moved, six great white birds. When they were above the tops of the
trees that edged the lake, the birds halted and hovered uncertainly, their
wings lifting and falling, their bodies slanting and sweeping slowly, in
short circles.
The suddenness of their approach, their presence so far inland,
something unfamiliar and foreign in the way they had winged their
progress, for a moment held the group upon the terrace silent.
"They are gulls from the Sound," said Lowell.
"They are too large for gulls," returned Mortimer. "They might be wild
geese, but," he answered himself, in a puzzled voice, "it is too late; and
wild geese follow a leader."
As though they feared the birds might hear them and take alarm, the
men, unconsciously, had spoken in low tones.
"They move as though they were very tired," whispered Elsie
Mortimer.
"I think," said Ainsley, "they have lost their way."
But even as he spoke, the birds, as though they had reached their goal,

spread their wings to the full length and sank to the shallow water at the
farthest margin of the lake.
As they fell the sun struck full upon them, turning their great pinions
into flashing white and silver.
"Oh!" cried the girl, "but they are beautiful!"
Between the house and the lake there was a ridge of rock higher than
the head of a man, and to this Ainsley and his guests ran for cover. On
hands and knees, like hunters stalking game, they scrambled up the face
of the rock and peered cautiously into the pond. Below them, less than
one hundred yards away, on a tiny promontory, the six white birds
stood motionless. They showed no sign of fear. They could not but
know that beyond the lonely circle of the pond were the haunts of men.
From the farm came the tinkle of a cow-bell, the bark of a dog, and in
the valley, six miles distant, rose faintly upon the stillness of the sunset
hour the rumble of a passing train. But if these sounds carried, the birds
gave no heed. In each drooping head and dragging wing, in the forward
stoop of each white body, weighing heavily on the slim, black legs, was
written utter weariness, abject fatigue. To each even to lower his bill
and sip from the cool waters was